It is with deepest regret that I have to tell her many readers that my dear wife Ann passed away quite suddenly at home on the morning of Saturday the 4th of August. Now there will be no more wonderful stories of Christoval Alvarez, or Nicholas and Emma. I have decided, however, to keep this website open for the foreseeable future, so that new readers will continue to have access to her compelling novels.

Until Nicholas Elyot, bookseller in fourteenth century Oxford, walked into my life, I had no more than a hazy knowledge of medieval books. The general impression I had gained, like most other people (I would guess), was that medieval books were limited in number, restricted as to contents, and confined to religious institutions and a very few royal and aristocratic houses.

﻿Recently I seem to have had a lot of people asking me about marketing books. Not only are there more and more authors turning to self-publishing, having found the traditional route did not suit them, for whatever reason, but also authors who are traditionally published have been discovering that a considerable burden of marketing their books nowadays falls on their own shoulders.

Most of the characters in my historical novels belong to the middle or lower classes and I have written about their food in Medieval Food – Part One and Medieval Food – Part Two, elsewhere on this blog. The Swynfen family in This Rough Ocean were gentry, but during the English Civil War even the gentry fell on hard times and lived hardly better than yeoman families.

Medieval food consisted of many of the same ingredients as we still use today, with the exception of imported foods which reached Europe later, such as potatoes, tea, coffee, and chocolate. Other imported ingredients, like sugar and certain spices, were available but costly. The main differences between then and now lay in the problems of preserving food over the lean months of winter and early spring, or in transit, as in moving fish inland, this last an imperative due to the Church’s rules about non-meat days.

I suppose to some it might seem strange that one should choose to write historical fiction. Or, indeed, to read historical fiction. Those who believe only the present day matters may snarl, ‘Escapism!’. They quite fail to see the point. Many even condemn the academic study of history. I remember a former colleague of my husband’s, in the history department of his university, who held an academic position as an ‘historian’, yet who believed it was not worth studying any history earlier than the late nineteenth century and sneered (yes, I do mean sneered) at my interest in earlier periods, dismissing them as irrelevant.

I think the one factor which distinguishes the professional writer from the non-professional lies in the concept of deadlines. There are many people who write for their own pleasure, because they enjoy it. I’ve now given up teaching in the university, but for a long time I had an adult literature class which developed a spin-off for those who wanted to write. Every few weeks they would bring along their work and read it out. Some of it was very good indeed. But – apart from one person – they had no interest in a professional writing career. They wrote for themselves or for their families. Several wrote stories based on their childhood, for the benefit of their children or grandchildren. That is how Laura Ingalls Wilder started out, we should remember. So did many other distinguished children’s authors.